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Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor, Op 50

Introduction

Nikolai Karlovich Medtner enrolled at the Moscow Conservatoire as a twelve-year-old just as Rachmaninov graduated from it. They finally met in 1902 thanks to Rachmaninov’s curiosity over what was to become Medtner’s F minor piano sonata, Op 5, the work which first brought him to significant public attention. A lifelong friendship was to unfold and the two composers’ biographies are intertwined, just as their respective outputs reveal acute awareness of one another’s work. Both came from privileged families and both became exiles from Russia, yet in other respects they were chalk and cheese. In America Rachmaninov, father of four and with mouths to feed, heeded the canny advice of promoters (even when inscrutably informed that the attention span of the average educated American audience was seventeen minutes), and prospered anew as one of the great pianists of his era. Medtner, childless and almost wholly dependent on his redoubtable wife, Anna, was described by an early colleague as ‘delicate, shy … a sensitive and lofty soul … a man “not of this world” … in no way adapted to practical life. The very simplest things seemed complicated to him …’ Obstinacy surfaced in his insistence on presenting lengthy recitals exclusively of his own music, even as both it and its pre-Revolutionary Russian world were superseded by harsher realities and the more abrasive voices rooted in them. Migrating from Germany to France and finally, in 1935, to England, in life Medtner never achieved the sustained recognition to which he aspired. The Medtners’ lives intersected with those of the Rachmaninovs both in Europe and (on tour) in America, with the worldly-wise Rachmaninov continually protecting his younger colleague from the attentions of the ‘wrong’ promoters and carrying out acts of selfless generosity by stealth.

Because Medtner’s idiom changed little in half a century, and owing also to his habitual notebooks from which ideas might come to fruition decades later, pinpointing a work’s date of inception is problematic. Nikolai wrote in September 1923 to his brother Alexander that the second piano concerto’s premiere could not take place in the forthcoming season for the laconically excellent reason that it ‘still doesn’t exist’. Other evidence suggests that he had begun sketches before leaving Russia in October 1921, that he did actually finish the short score in the summer of 1922, and that it was the therefore orchestration of the work that delayed its final appearance.

In the same summer Rachmaninov was completing his own fourth concerto (reciprocally dedicated to Medtner but later subject to drastic revision), and the composers sustained a correspondence at this stage, one aspect being Medtner’s dismay at the magnitude of the orchestrator’s task and his own relative inexperience in it. His comments show him less interested in sound ‘colour’ than in the ‘argument’ of the music itself, which he held incidentally responsible for emerging colour in any case. Whereas Rachmaninov’s scoring is expert not only in vivid symphonic music but also in its knowing subjugation of a concerto orchestra for accompanying purposes, Medtner struggled to distance himself from the pianist’s instinct. Surviving manuscripts show that the hapless Anna made ink fair copies of entire piano parts to the concertos, these sitting in the middle of the page as in a full score, awaiting Nikolai’s pencilled first thoughts on the surrounding instrumentation. This inevitably results in few moments of respite for the soloist, whose material becomes the fons et origo of almost everything else. It may be helpful to think of Angus Morrison’s comment on Constant Lambert’s piano solo part in The Rio Grande: ‘Constant’s idea [was] that the piano should be like the ‘I’ in a novel, a central narrator … reflecting upon the varied episodes … and binding them together into one subjective experience.’ Something of the same applies to Medtner, yet his scoring here is more than ‘fit for purpose’, while the soloist’s part matches Rachmaninov’s concertos in its all-encompassing virtuosity, seldom falling silent except in passages immediately preceding its own solo cadenzas (although another instance occurs at the end of the first movement’s exposition).

Medtner’s other two piano concertos deploy a monolithic form based largely on the seamless unfolding of free variations. This renders them more challenging for the listener than the second concerto, which falls into three distinct movements: Toccata, Romanza and Divertimento. An immediately recognizable feature is Medtner’s febrile rhythmic imagination, operating habitually in fruitful contrast with his more conventional harmonic language. A predilection for quaver rhythms grouped in threes, creating opposition to the prevailing beat, means that spontaneous dance is seldom far away and serves to leaven or intersperse moments of more elevated rhetoric. A restless opening rhythm launches a lengthy paragraph leading to a lyrical theme in the relative major key and a more scherzo-like pendant theme in G major. Development of these disparate ideas is unified partly by the ubiquity of the piano, partly by a kind of osmosis whereby the melodic outlines of one theme may borrow the rhythmic characteristics of another; for example, one hears the lyrical theme’s reincarnation in diminution (proportionally lessened note lengths), discovering an unsuspected kinship to the opening Toccata idea. The movement owes much to the composer’s earlier, monolithic Sonata tragica, Op 39 No 5, in the same key, despite a much more buoyant mood. A climactic onset to the recapitulation leads into a cadenza whose trajectory affords revealing comparison with its counterpart in Rachmaninov’s third concerto. As in that work, the first movement eventually makes a flickeringly enigmatic exit, its evanescence belying the heroic substance of what has gone before.

The Romanza (in A flat major) offers one of Medtner’s most artlessly improvisatory melodies, spinning a longer line through a series of variations in which the scherzo material is centrally placed, thus nodding not only at Rachmaninov’s second and third concertos but also at Scriabin’s piano concerto, Op 20. On either side of this, the climactic material is not only among Medtner’s most overt references to Rachmaninov by virtue of its opulent textures and generous melodic impulse, but also (towards the end) arguably the closest Medtner’s music ever came to the erotic.

The Romanza foretells the opening of the Divertimento before expiring on an inclusive chord, the soloist’s resolution thus serving to launch the new movement. Despite its innocuous title, this (in one-in-a-bar triple time) bristles with virtuoso challenges and disparate ideas. A sinuous theme in regular crotchets provides a secondary subject. In the central development of the movement, a striking burlesque episode shows that, despite that early colleague’s estimate of his personality, Medtner did not lack a sense of humour. An ensuing dialogue between piano and orchestra hints at improvising folk musicians before thematic material from the first movement is recapitulated and extended, its accentuation sometimes falling in a deliberately haphazard fashion against the revised bar length. This is ingeniously combined with exploration of the Divertimento’s own subject matter. After the recapitulation a brief but turbulent cadenza launches a lengthy concluding stretto section, eventually reaching a rising chromatic roulade from the soloist which—in more burlesque mood—fortuitously mirrors the vertiginous descent of octaves in the peroration of Rachmaninov’s third concerto. A riotous conclusion underlines this work as one of Medtner’s sunniest and most unbridled inspirations, and an excellent introduction to his music. The work was first heard at Moscow Conservatoire in March 1927, during Medtner’s only return tour to what had meanwhile become Soviet Russia. In emotional circumstances it was very warmly received, yet only now is it beginning to find a regular toehold in the concerto repertoire.